past the gag. Let him die, he prayed, was praying, when Randal scrambled out of
his disarray with the armor and reached after something else. The painting
manifested in his grip.
“Get a light,” Randal yelled at him. In one dullwitted moment Molin knew what
Randal was after, recoiled from the thought of the deed and wondered in the same
numb-minded flicker why a candle, why not call fire: but a candle was apt for
fire, the canvas was magical and unapt, it resisted destruction. “Light!” Molin
bellowed at the priest who hovered terrified in custody of Ischade’s body. The
priest cast about this way and that, and in that selfsame moment Randal snatched
up a handful of papers and blasted them into flame. The fire whumphed up and
took the corner of the canvas on which Tempus and Niko and Roxane existed in
triad, and Molin clenched his hands on the back of the chair in front of him and
flinched as the smoke poured up from it, as Randal held onto burning paper and
burning canvas, his face twisted in the pain of the burning that went up and up,
the fire licking out at sleeves, at robe, at hair, at anything it could get
while Randal turned and twisted in what looked like some grotesque dancer’s
contortions, keeping it away from himself and what else it reached for. Silver
smoke poured up, mingled unnaturally with black. There was a stench of sulphur,
and a shadow poured out of that smoke, a presence of intolerable menace. The
priest screamed and covered his head. Then that darkness went- somewhere.
At the same moment Niko’s body went limp as the dead and a slow trickle of blood